Ghost Moth

by Michele Forbes

  The Bedford girls have organized a summer fair in their back garden. Maureen and Elizabeth, in particular, had begun pestering their mother early that morning. Elsa’s sunburn had tempered her enthusiasm a little—she was still feeling hot and sore—but when Katherine agreed, Elsa had immediately drawn a sign in purple crayon on a piece of cardboard saying SUMMER FAIR IN BACK GARDEN—ALL WELCOME and had hung it on their front gate. The money they would raise from this humble affair, the girls had decided, would go to the Black Babies of Africa. Katherine, however, had persuaded Elsa not to add this to the bottom of her sign, but just to put FOR CHARITY instead. The Black Babies was, after all, a Catholic charity, Katherine had patiently explained to her daughters, and so—as she had phrased it—“they had to be careful not to put their Protestant neighbors out a little.” Despite struggling to understand this, Elsa had nevertheless followed her mother’s advice. Katherine had also suggested to Elsa that she change the prize for one of the games that was being planned for the fair at the far end of the garden. Elsa was intending to place three buckets upside down beside the apple tree. Whoever could hit all three of the buckets blindfolded with a rubber ball would win a holy picture of Saint Francis of Assisi. The picture, Katherine had suggested, should be replaced with a small bag of toffees. Elsa had understood this suggestion perfectly. Of course, she had thought, everybody in the world would much prefer to win a bag of toffees than win a picture of a solemn-looking saint.

  Despite the beautiful day, Katherine feels tired and cold, as though still in shock since her encounter with the seal the day before. The cuts on her legs from the rocks are beginning to sting, perhaps because they’re beginning to heal, she thinks. She wants to keep her mind on the summer fair. She wants to have a lovely day with her children.

  Elsa is looking at Isabel. Isabel lives the next road up from Elsa, smokes Benson & Hedges in the back field on her way home from Sunday school, and once chased Elsa down the street, waving a pair of her father’s underpants. Elsa had felt frightened of the underpants, as though they held some sinister secret of the grown-up world, and had then felt stupid for feeling frightened. Isabel’s father was a dapper, fervently religious man who made lampstands out of seashells and empty wine bottles, disapproved of having a television in the house, and never cut his grass on a Sunday. But Elsa thought that underpants were underpants no matter whom they belonged to.

  The boiled cake that had been made for the fair had not been boiled. It had been baked in the oven like any other cake. But its generous quantities of sultanas and raisins had been steamed gently so that they were plump and soft before being folded into the mixture of cinnamon, flour, eggs, and sugar. Katherine had made this cake with her mother when she was a child and now made it regularly with her own children. Elsa and Elizabeth, that morning, had slipped their girlish fingers around the insides of the deep ceramic bowl as Katherine was putting the cake into the oven and had lifted the remains of the fruity mixture to their mouths and licked their fingers clean.

  Isabel knows how nice boiled cake tastes. She has tasted it before. There are eleven slices on the plate.

  “Your hot pants are lovely,” Elsa says to Isabel, feeling somehow that only a compliment will be worthy of a reply.

  “They’re from my half cousin. She lives in Canada. She also sent me a purple pair. I could’ve worn them today, but I didn’t want to.”

  “They’re lovely,” Elsa repeats meekly.

  “I suppose so.”

  Isabel looks at Elsa with a charged disdain. “You know yous are the only Catholic family in this street.”

  “Yes, I know.” Elsa lowers her head as though she has been found out.

  “In this whole area.” Isabel says the word area as though she has just overheard it from a couple of whispering grown-ups. She tilts her chin skyward.

  “Well, there’s also Mr. and Mrs. McGovern—”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “And really we’re half and half, ’cos Daddy was a Protestant and only turned Catholic when he married Mummy.” Elsa pushes her finger into a piece of boiled cake as she speaks.

  “You go to a Catholic school, so yous are Catholics, so yous are.”

  Elsa looks at Isabel and has nothing to say.

  “I got caught smoking in the back field,” Isabel continues, suddenly impressed with herself. She nods her head slowly and widens her eyes at Elsa to denote just what serious trouble she is in.

  “Did your mum catch you?”

  “No, Mrs. MacAllister from our Sunday School did. She’s a big pig! She should mind her own business. What was she doin’ in the back field anyway? How much is the cake?”

  “A penny a slice,” Elsa replies.

  “And how much is that?” Isabel points at the one home-baked cherry iced bun that has survived since yesterday.

  “A penny a bun.”

  “There’s only one bun.” Isabel adjusts the seat of her hot pants.

  “It’s a penny.”

  “And how much are those?” Isabel fingers some custard creams that have been placed hastily onto a paper napkin.

  “You get three for a penny.”

  “How much did ye say the cake was?”

  “A penny a slice.” Elsa begins to grow more and more nervous during this exchange, as if Isabel’s haughty tone has the power to reveal Elsa as a liar.

  “The cake looks r-e-a-l-l-y-n-i-c-e.” Isabel spreads her words like lemon curd on warm bread, a cue for ingratiation.

  “My mummy made it.” Elsa wants to stay Isabel’s friend.

  “My mummy makes a chocolate and lime Victoria sponge cake for the Sunday School prayer meetings every third Sunday. The vicar always says it’s the nicest cake he has ever tasted. He says that every time.”

  The sun is now shining directly into Elsa’s face, making it crinkle like paper.

  “Your face is really red,” continues Isabel.

  “I know.”

  “And you got white patches of stuff on your chin.”

  Elsa strokes her chin to see if she can feel the remains of the calamine lotion. “I got sunburn.”

  “But I’ve no money with me.” Isabel talks now in a strange, tiny voice, adjusting the seat of her hot pants again. Elsa wishes she did not feel a compulsion to placate Isabel. Despite herself, despite how Isabel makes her feel, Elsa finds herself picking out the biggest slice of boiled cake to give to Isabel.

  “You can have this for nothing if you like.” Elsa is smiling on the outside.

  Isabel curls her top lip away from her teeth and then quickly pokes the air with her index finger just in front of Elsa’s face by way of a thank-you. Elsa feels unsettled by the gesture but finds herself smiling once again at Isabel. Isabel then sidles off to peruse what the fair has to offer her, nibbling superciliously at her slice of boiled cake.

  One of the tables at the fair, a folding card table with a felt-covered top, displays some fragrant items, small bars of lavender soap, a bottle of shampoo, bubble bath in a snowman that has been sitting around since Christmas, and a miniature bottle of 4711 eau de cologne. Another of the tables, a box turned upside down and draped with a beige head scarf, displays an assortment of books—The Lodger, The Reluctant Legionnaire—and a few well-read copies of the Reader’s Digest. There are also two children’s books on the table, ones Maureen and Elizabeth had felt were too babyish for girls their age.

  The table nearest the end of the garden is the white elephant stall, upon which they have arranged all sorts of oddments in various clusters: rubber balls, pieces of Lego, a doll’s bed with one of its legs broken, some pencils, an eggcup with BUTLINS HOLIDAY CAMP printed on it, Twinkle comics, a skipping rope, and a small papier-mâché mountain with grass painted on its flanks and a long winding river of blue ribbon that Elizabeth had made.

  Elsa had thought how strange the words white elephant were together as she had written them on a piece of paper with her green crayon. She still had no idea what this expression actually meant, even though
Maureen had taken pains to explain it to her. “Just things, different things together. Oddments. You know!” But the more Maureen had become impatient with Elsa, the less Elsa understood what Maureen was explaining.

  Earlier that morning, Elsa had watched as Maureen had developed a plan for the afternoon. On the oddment table—before it had officially been entitled the white elephant stall—Maureen had found a blue glass ball, the size of a large orange, which was nestled in a straw-colored lacy bag. When the light caught the glass ball, it shimmered aquamarine, sea green, and pinks. No one knew where the glass ball had come from. Katherine had suspected that it had been part of a promotional gift she had received when she had bought two pairs of nylons. But she couldn’t quite remember.

  Maureen had lifted the blue glass ball out of its lacy home and taken it with her to Katherine’s bedroom. Elsa, curious to know what her big sister was up to, had followed her up the stairs and had sat quietly outside the room, watching through the half-opened doorway. Maureen had then selected her means of transformation by prospecting through her mother’s wardrobe. She had tied a green paisley scarf around her head and a brown woolen scarf around her shoulders and had secured one of Katherine’s skirts, a mushroom-colored calf-length cotton one, around her waist with a soft leather belt. She had walked around the bedroom in majestic circles, her skirt swishing and swooshing as she did so. Then she had fingered the contents of the little cream ceramic dish that sat on Katherine’s dressing table, and which held a few pieces of Katherine’s jewelry. But not finding what she needed there, she had opened her mother’s wooden jewelry box. The lid of the box was painted as if it had been embroidered with fine threads displaying little spots of cerise and sage upon a yielding black. The sudden movement of the box had set its tiny mechanics whirring and releasing the delicate plink plink of the opening notes of the theme from The Third Man. Maureen had found the looped earrings she had been looking for in the scented honey-colored innards of the box and had clipped one on each ear. She had smeared the lids of her eyes with a deep green and had reddened her lips. Then, holding up the hem of her skirt and angling her head to one side, she had paraded up and down the floor of the bedroom in front of the oval mirror of the dressing table, admiring her daring transformation into Madam Maureen, fortune-teller extraordinaire.

  The wooden clotheshorse, draped with sheets and blankets, provided the structure for the walls of Madam Maureen’s fortune-telling tent. A pink cotton sheet, fastened to the sides with clothes pegs, was its low slung ceiling.

  Maureen had stuck a sign saying A PENNY FOR YOUR FORTUNE on the front of the tent and had hung a pink silk scarf over its entrance.

  Katherine had a little book of cloakroom tickets, which she said she would give out to people so that they would know what number they were in the queue. They could give Maureen the money before they left the tent. Maureen had begun to feel a little nervous as her mother was explaining this to her.

  By the time Maureen had declared her tent officially open, Elizabeth and Elsa had just finished organizing various games for the fair. They had a pin the tail on the donkey game. The donkey—drawn by Elizabeth with crumbling white chalk on an old freestanding blackboard they had found in the coal shed—had legs of different sizes, each of which disappeared off the bottom edge of the blackboard in search of a hoof. The tail had been cut out from paper and colored with brown crayon, and a small lump of Plasticine had been placed where the tail should be attached to the donkey. They had a game of hoopla set up on a tea tray on the grass, with prizes of a little woolen doll, which Elizabeth had knit at school; a felt rabbit belonging to Maureen, which she said she had outgrown; and a small teddy with a pinched expression and tiny beads for eyes, which no one could remember owning. It was the setting up of the three upturned plastic buckets by the apple tree that Elsa and Elizabeth had found to be the most frustrating, as Stephen had kept picking up the buckets and taking them away to some other place in the garden and then filling them with stones, or carrots from the kitchen, or putting his socks in them.

  Peter Barnsley had been the first to arrive at the fair, and indeed had been the only visitor for the first fifteen minutes or so. Elizabeth and Elsa had said nothing to him. Instead, they had watched him with a burning sense of disappointment as he paraded around the garden, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, his nose dirty, sporting a wide proprietorial grin on his face. This had not been the opening to the fair that they had expected. Where was the excited rush of people?

  Katherine had gone into the house to answer the telephone and to change Stephen’s nappy. Maureen had been sitting in her fortune-telling tent all the while, quiet and expectant in the heat. It had seemed like a very long time before enough people had appeared to make it feel like the fair had indeed begun.

  Next in line to arrive, after Peter Barnsley, had been the Wilson children. All four enormous children had wandered awkwardly and aimlessly around the garden from one table to the next with blank expressions on their faces. Elsa had watched them and had thought of Mr. Wilson, their father, with his shiny accordion. Mr. Wilson was a tiny man who had eyes that were permanently half-closed—a condition he had been born with—so whenever he wanted to look up, he had to tilt his head right back until it nestled between his shoulder blades. An unfortunate combination, Elsa had thought, his height and his eyes. On bonfire nights Mr. Wilson always played “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” and the Protestant loyalist anthem “The Sash My Father Wore” with a feverish agility, always working up to a stirring rendition of “Spanish Eyes.” Elsa often wondered if he thought of his own eyes when he played it.

  Then Mrs. Hamilton had arrived with her incredibly noisy twin boys, Kenneth and Keith. One of the twins—Elsa thought it might have been Kenneth, but she had never been sure—had been recently expelled from school for setting fire to the caretaker’s dog. Mrs. Hamilton had apparently just shrugged her shoulders in the principal’s office when she had been called in to explain, saying in a watery tone of voice, “Oh, boys will be boys.”

  Katherine had come back out to the garden with Stephen in tow and had begun to offer tea to the parents and lemonade to the children. She had handed out some cloakroom tickets to those in the small queue that had already formed outside Madam Maureen’s fortune-telling tent, announcing as she did that Madam Maureen was finally ready to receive customers.

  And Isabel had arrived, a summery tune of blond and yellow, swinging her hips to her own music. Purple or yellow, purple or yellow? went the melody, all the way up the driveway of Elsa’s house. Yellow or purple, yellow or . . . As soon as she had spotted Elsa at the home baking stall, she had made a beeline for her. Yellow or purple?

  “They’re lovely,” Elsa had said.

  “I suppose so.”

  Now, the summer light showers everything. Isabel wanders around the garden, perusing every table, adjusting her hot pants and eating her boiled cake. Elizabeth invites Isabel to play hit the bucket, but Isabel just shakes her blond curls and wanders off. Then Isabel pushes her way in front of the youngest Wilson girl, who is waiting patiently in the queue to have her fortune told by Madam Maureen—even though the Wilson girl has a cloakroom ticket and Isabel doesn’t.

  Elsa leaves her home baking stall and wanders over to the back of Madam Maureen’s fortune-telling tent. She wants to see what is happening inside the tent and carefully pulls back one of the sheets. Madam Maureen is hard at work. She rubs her crystal ball. She is looking at Peter Barnsley’s dirty nose. She tells Peter Barnsley that he is going to marry a Chinese woman and that he is going to make it big in the carpet business. She tells Mrs. Hamilton, who is next in line, that she is to make sure that she does the football pools this Saturday, because there are big winnings in store for her, and Mrs. Hamilton laughs a high little laugh, like a bird’s trill, and shakes her head as though she feels sorry for Maureen as she leaves the tent. Maureen then tells Isabel that she is going to become very sick but that a man in a white coat will ask
her to marry him. A doctor. He will save her life. And they will travel up the Amazon together and have lots of children and live in the jungle among lions and tigers and collect coconuts and bananas for breakfast. Isabel is, however, unimpressed and leaves without paying. Elsa watches as Isabel bends to exit the tent and sees that Isabel’s gold hot pants are now stuck firmly between the cheeks of her arse. And Maureen tells the youngest and largest of the Wilson girls, who struggles for what seems like an interminably long time to get inside the tent, that she is going to live in America and have a huge house with a freezer and two televisions. The Wilson girl smiles. Now Maureen shakes her head as though she feels sorry for the Wilson girl.

  Elsa pulls her head back out of the tent and sees that at the end of the queue Katherine has placed a very compliant Richard Marr. Richard Marr lives right across the street and has straight brown hair that falls over his eyes. Maureen has had a crush on him since the beginning of the summer. She discreetly told only her best friend, Patricia, who, of course, told only her mother, who, of course, told only Katherine. Elsa pokes her head back into the tent and watches; she cannot wait until it’s Richard Marr’s turn to have his fortune told.

  Maureen gives a jittery, stupid sort of laugh when Richard Marr ducks his head in under the entrance to the fortune-telling tent. Her cheeks streak crimson as she looks intently into her wondrous ball of the sea as though her thoughts are racing and chasing inside it like a shoal of frenzied sea fish, and she stammers out quickly that Richard Marr will win a competition and get a dog. It’s all over so quickly. Richard Marr leaves the tent as quietly as he entered it. Maureen has a look on her face, as though she wants him to come back in again and then again she doesn’t.

  After Richard Marr, it is the turn of one of the Hamilton twins, who nearly knocks the whole fortune-telling tent over as he clambers into it and looks like his mother sent him in. Elsa is almost sure that it’s Keith. Maureen becomes instantly agitated with him and tells him that one day he will go deaf and that he should learn sign language as soon as possible.